) THE A Ii NEW IOK ...,.:. t: ::: II ..---- I III' '- ,- j: .... tp :: ...:: fro /J\'\ \ *' .;. . \ .. " 0 ....,,, '\: 0 0 . · 0 . 1, · "- ".. THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment S PRING-TRAINING NOTE: Last Fri- day one of the Central Park seals fumbled twenty-fi ve out of thirty- six fish tossed to it at lunchtime. W E nominate for the bloodthirstiest ad vertising tie-up of 1 944 an ad for Little, Brown & Co. we saw recent- ly in Publishers) Weekly. Discussing Helen MacInnes's new thriller about the Polish underground, the publishers pointed out to the canny bookseller: "The Russian Army on the soil of Po- land won't do this book any harm." The Battle of Flanders didn't do pop- pies any harm either, eh, Little, Brown? W HEN air-mail postage went up to eight cents and local postage to three, it was a step in the right direction, but not a long enough step. We hope no- body will think we are being whimsical when we say that postage ought to cost even more than it does now-a great deal more. To have a note delivered here in town within twelve hours ought to be worth ten or fifteen cents of any- body's money, and the out-oF-town tar- iff ought to be twenty-five cents., Air mail and special delivery should be away up-a rate of fifty cents, say. It is no use arguing that higher postage would be hard on poor people; the poor can- not live by stamps alone. In a mis- guided attempt to make the mails avail- able to widows and orphans, this nation has laid itself open to ten times as much direct-by-mail advertising as is good for it. ( We have several other bright schemes for helping finance the war, and if Secretary Morgenthau would step aside for forty-eight hours, we'd be glad to start the ball rolling on them.) S OMEBODY has patented a revolv- ing door equipped with an electric eye to start it going at "the right mo- ment." In our opinion there is no "right moment" for a door to begin revolving; almost always it's an unhappy compro- mise between two opposing factions, one trying to get into the building, the other . Th " h " trYIng to get out. e rIg t moment never arrives, although we have seen neurotics hanging around the outskirts hopefully waiting for it. A revolving door is simply an ingenious trap which most people have learned to spring with- out getting killed. What a revolving door needs is not an electric eye but a steel grab hook to help hesitant ladies and a centrifugal governor to foil the ambi- tions of human dynamos. An electric eye for a revolving door would need to be fitted with bifocals, because one per- son's right moment js another person's Dunkirk. O NE evening last week a lady who had been dining at a little French restaurant with some friends went to the powder room to tidy up before leaving. Several minutes later, as the party was getting into a cab, she exclaimed "Hea v- ens! My ring!" and dashed back into the restaurant. Well, the ring, which was worth a cool seventy-five thousand dollars, wasn't on the wash basin; wasn't anywhere. After the police had been called in and had keenly questioned a number of other diners and the restau- rant staff, the ring turned up. It had slipped down behind the wash basin and there it was, big as life. Our readers may be wondering why we bother to re- hash this story, which-except for the somewhat startling value of the ring and the consequent interest of the police, who are snobs at heart-is one almost every husband can tell, and, with any provocation at all, does. Our reason is that the lady was once elected Miss Universe. There is an eerie sort of pat- ness about the episode: -Miss Universe being so flagrantly guilty of the most universal foible of her sex. \Ve can't escape the irrational feeling that if it were possible to cuff some solid sense into Miss Universe, no woman would ever again shatter the evening quiet of the East Fifties with a shout of "Heav- ens! My ring! " F ROM our standpoint, the pleasantest sight in town one day last week was a gentleman, whose name we didn't quite catch, at the Union League Club hobby show. He seemed like a typical clubman -a banker, perhaps, grizzled, portly, in immaculate morning clothes and with a flower in his buttonhole-and he was demonstrating his hobby, which happens to be the collection of vårious gadgets that pare and core apples. He owns at least thirty of them, and must have the largest collection of its kind in the world, and he stood there, before a group of fellow-clubmen and visitors, taking ap- ples out of a large basket and paring and coring them with one device or an- other. Sheer joy was on his face as the shiny red skins spiralled off and the hard little cores popped out, and in his hands there was an economy and precision we are sure he never could have achieved handling first mortgages. We stood watching him as long as we dared, and when we left we felt more confidence in the Union League Club than we had at any other time since 1928. "T IFE" probably put an end to Gov- L ernor Dewey's chances for the Presidency the other week. Perhaps it was intentional, but more likely it was